William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

stockyards and shipbuilding, its cotton mills and factories, canals would inevitably have given way to faster, more adaptable railways that could cut through mountains, climb hills, and cross valleys without the time-consuming and expensive business of locks filling and emptying, and the moving of tons of water. The destruction along the way was merely a part of that progress that there was no art or skill to avoid. Farmers, landed gentry, vicars, or the tenants of villages or towns would not have liked canals any better.
    He saw articles with drawings of protestors holding placards, cartoons in newspapers and periodicals calling the roaring, steam-belching iron engines the work of Satan, whereas in fact they were only the work of industry and time. Corruption, if there was any, was in the nature of man.
    He sat until his head ached and his shoulders were stiff, searching every record he had determined to. There was gain and loss, but it was only the ordinary fortunes of commerce. There were stupid decisions, beside those that he could have foreseen as mistaken with the wisdom of some half-recollected experience. And of course there were those which were simply bad luck—but there was good luck as well. There were errors of judgment, but small, a matter of distance, a mismeasurement here or there.
    As he pored over the pages the work became more and more familiar to him. Time stopped, like a wheel moving a cog, and he could have looked up from the lamplight on the papers to see Dundas smiling at him, not the empty inn bedroom, or the lonely tables of the records office or the library.
    It was the second night that he awoke in the dark, lying rigid in the bed, startled by the silence and with no idea at all where he was. There were still shouting voices in his head—furious, accusing, people jostling each other, white faces twisted with grief.
    He was breathless, as if he had been running. Without realizing it he had sat up in the bed. His body was stiff. What was the dream? He wanted to escape, run and run and leave it behind him forever!
    And yet if he did, it would follow him. His mind knew that. If you fled your fears, they pursued you. He could remember that much from the coach crash which had taken his past, and from the nightmares that had followed it.
    Nothing in him was willing to turn and look at those accusing faces. He felt almost bruised by them, as if they could physically have touched him, so real had they been. But there was no escape, because they were inside him, part of his mind, his identity.
    Very slowly he lay down again, against sheets that were now cold. He was shivering. The fear was still there, some nameless horror that even when he found the courage to look, or could no longer help it, held no form. He could remember the anger, the loss, but the faces themselves were gone. What did they think he had done? Taken their land? Cut a farm in half, ruined an estate, demolished houses, even desecrated a burial ground? It was not personal; he had been acting for the railway!
    But it was acutely personal to those who lost. What was more personal than your home? Or the land your fathers and their fathers had farmed for generations? Or the earth in which your family’s bones were buried?
    Was that what it was? The blind, terrified resistance to change? Then he was not guilty of anything but being the instrument of progress. So why did his body ache and why was he afraid to go back to sleep because of the demons in his mind which would return when he had no guard to keep them out?
    Was it not land but the infinitely worse thing he dared not think of at all . . . the crash?
    He had found nothing except the possibility that Baltimore and Sons had made too much profit from the land where the track had been diverted around the hill he had climbed with so much pleasure. Another, older survey had made it at least fifty feet less. With a skillful mixture of gradient and cutting, a tunnel would have been unnecessary. But the blasting would still have been expensive. Granite was hard and moving it was costly. Was the profit enough to justify calling it fraud? Only if he could prove foreknowledge and intent. And even then it was open to doubt.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The following morning it took Monk an hour and a half after leaving the town to reach the workings of the new railway.
    It was a fine day with a light wind rippling the grass, carrying the scents of earth and spring and the sound of sheep in the distance.